[meme]

Originally Posted by SingleEyePhotos

Uh-oh... That was it - thank you C. Watkins-Nash! I think the 1st post on this thread specifically said to pick the menu item 'manage collections' , at least when I started - maybe it's been changed now to be more clear. If not - hint, hint...

Nope, didn't mention 'Manage Collections' in the original post - but I can see why people would use it - when I first saw it I thought I had a typo in the code

Since feedback on the plugin has been requested several times in this thread, I'll provide my experiences and the things I noted.
1. The plugin will only add books that are 'on device' to collections. So, if you have some books in your library that are not on the device, they won't end up in collections. That bit me because about 25% of my books, for whatever reason, were on the device, but Calibre didn't recognize them as 'on device'. I tried sending those books to the device, but it only made duplicates, and if I deleted one (the old one), Calibre said that they weren't on the device any more. I finally took a deep breath, crossed my fingers, and deleted ALL books from my device. I tried running the plugin and kept getting an error. After a few tests, I realized that the books MUST be on the device, not just in the library. Once I loaded all the books to the device, which took some time but went without incident, the error disappeared.

Yep, Kindle will only put books into its collections if they actually exist on the Kindle (when you restart it does a sanity check of what you put there and cleans things up). So when you use the plugin to create collections, it only looks at books that are both on the device and in library.

I've had the issue of sending books to the Kindle twice and getting duplicates - I think the UUIDs don't match. I haven't really looked into it - my Kindle is currently a complete mess of books and collections I'm testing with

Hopefully the plugin's error message was clear that you need to send books to the device - if not, it will be in the next version.

2. Once the issue in #1 was cleared, the plugin worked exactly as described. No problems whatsoever. I did end up with some books that were not in collections, but after thinking about it a bit, I determined that that was a function of incorrect metadata in the library, not the plugin. I deleted them and updated the metadata, then re-did the plugin. That corrected the problem.

Again, hopefully there was a warning about the books that didn't go into collections - it should tell you to reconvert them, etc. I think I'll move those warnings to the top of the report

3. I had a custom 'Collection' column set up, and used that for the plugin. I used that column to mark the ORIGINAL collection the book was in, and used the '+' indicator for the Calibre catalog functon to mark books as read. I would have liked to point the plugin to the Collection column and somehow tell it that if there was a tag '+' to change the data in that column to Already Read. But I couldn't figure that out, and ended up adding 'Already Read' to my Collection column. I think it would be nice if the catalog and collection plugins could somehow be integrated. I didn't want collections built from tags (except for '+'), and I didn't want books listed in 2 collections (Already Read and the original genre collection).

Sounds like you need a new custom column that uses a template that checks if the '+' is set, and if it is puts Already Read, and if not puts the value of the Collection field (or just adds Already Read to the collection, or creates it as collection-Already Read).

To summarize, it took me a while to do the first run-through with the plugin, but once I got those glitches worked out, the plugin was great! I re-did it again today with only 3 new books, and it only took a few minutes from start to finish. So long as I continue to handle the transfer to library and then back to device consistently, going forward, it should be a fairly quick process to update collections using the Calibre plugin.

You're welcome